A recent report from Jason Schreier revealedBioShock Infinite’s troubling development process, exposing Irrational Games for messy time management and harsh crunch comparable toThe Last of Us 2andCyberpunk 2077.
Since its release back in 2013,BioShock Infinitehas won numerous awards for its music, narrative, art design, and character writing. Most reviewers gaveInfinitenear-perfect scores, some of which stating it was one of the best games they had ever played. Its story and themes had evolved from pastBioShockinstallments, which were mostly centered around the action with an overarching narrative sprinkled in. ButInfinite’s plot-twist endingprovoked debates in the gaming community and is still being unraveled with scientific theories relating to space-time and multiple universes.
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But as impactful as the story may have been, a report from Jason Schreier via Polygon reveals the turbulent development process behind the shiny hit. Schreier interviewed multiple personalities involved withBioShock Infinite’s development process, including Mike Snight, Chad LaClair, Rod Fergusson, and Don Roy, who had previously worked with Sony and Microsoft as a game producer.
After demos ofBioShock Infinite’s beautiful world of Columbiaand enticing gameplay with Elizabeth’s supernatural powers impressed gamers in 2011, many senior developers left the project and quit Irrational, frustrated with the development process. At this point,Infinitehad suffered several delays and employees feared that the game would never be finished. Irrational had also scrapped the multiplayer mode to focus on the single-player campaign, leaving years of work fruitless.
When Don Roy came onto the project, Schreier’s report details, there was no playable build of the game for him to look at. Instead,BioShockInfinite’s storywas in pieces, falling far short of a functioning game after starting development back in 2008. Roy was most surprised by the level of disorganization at Irrational after it turned its staff into a few dozen people to almost two hundred in the span of about four years. It caused “all sorts of deficiencies in their production pipelines,” Schreier states.
Rod Fergusson was brought on as an essential piece to completing the project by making the tough decisions needed to get it out the door, includingmandatory crunch. Artist Chad LaClair revealed that he put in 12-hour days for “most of the final year,” citingBioShock Infiniteas one of the hardest projects he had been a part of and the worst crunch he has experienced.
FollowingBioShock Infinite’s release in 2013, much of the Irrational Games staff was laid off to restructure the company around narrative games. It later rebranded as Ghost Story Games to separate itself from its history as Irrational.
BioShock Infiniteis out now for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
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